Jennifer Lawrence is ‘better than ever’ in a searing portrait of motherhood

Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Lynne Ramsay’s ‘surreal’ and ‘intense’ study of postpartum depression that has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of cinema’s most searing portraits of a woman who doesn’t take to motherhood. And the extraordinary British director’s new film is almost an unofficial prequel. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s acclaimed novel of the same name, Die, My Love is a surreal, intense and sometimes darkly hilarious exploration of postpartum depression – although it does seem for a time as it’s going to be a lot more besides.

Jennifer Lawrence is better than ever as Grace, an aspiring writer who moves from New York to the countryside with her partner Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson with a similar level of vanity-free gusto. The couple’s new life has the potential to be idyllic. They are fiercely in love, as the animalistic sex scenes demonstrate, and their spacious clapboard house is surrounded by woods and meadows, so Grace will have the peace and freedom to write a novel.

Still, the skittering of rats’ footsteps in the opening scene is a warning that this dream home might become a nightmare, so it’s no surprise when, once the couple have a baby boy, and Jackson starts working away from home several days a week, Grace is beset by boredom, loneliness and sexual frustration. Then when Jackson comes home with an untrained, perpetually barking dog, her situation gets even more maddening.

Die, My Love should probably be shown to teenagers as a warning of how repetitive, exasperating and alienating it can be to look after a baby. Ramsay makes expert use of countless techniques – detailed sound design, insistent music, mixed-up chronology, bizarre dream sequences – to convey the sense that Grace is becoming blearily adrift from reality: she may be even more unstable than the traumatised protagonist of Ramsay’s last film, 2017’s You Were Never Really Here.

What stops the film becoming too stressful to bear is that Lawrence is always tough and vibrant, even at the character’s lowest ebb. She never begs us to sympathise with her. And the script can be sharply funny, too. Jackson sees himself as a supportive partner, but he is the kind of man who won’t switch off a noisy rock song during a heart-to-heart conversation because, after all, “it’s a classic”. And Grace’s weariness and resentment prompt her to be deliciously sarcastic to any of the folksy locals who have the temerity to be nice to her.

As well as building an unsettling, American-gothic atmosphere, the film’s first half contains all sorts of omens that Grace’s internal strife could soon be shockingly externalised. Her habit of creeping through the meadow clutching a large kitchen knife hints that Die, My Love might become a slasher movie. The motorcyclist who keeps roaring past the house, his identity hidden by his crash helmet’s tinted visor, suggests that a home-invasion thriller is in the offing. The references to the suicide of the house’s previous owner implies that the film could be a supernatural chiller about a cursed haunted house. And then there is Jackson’s recently widowed mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), who has taken to sleepwalking along the road that leads from her house, not far away, carrying a loaded rifle. The sequences shared by her and Grace make the intriguing case that the experience of adjusting to a birth is mirrored by the experience of adjusting to a death. These sequences also promise that some kind of violent confrontation is only a matter of time.

It’s disappointing then, that none of these various harbingers of doom develops into a storyline. The film has its share of incidents, but it’s essentially a mood piece – one long nervous breakdown – rather than a drama with a plot. And because the later scenes keep reiterating the parenting-is-hell theme that was made so clear in the early ones, Die, My Love gets exhausting well before it drifts to the end credits. Ramsay’s film-making flair lights up scene after scene, but as the narrative fragments, and reality and fantasy blur, you’re left with the urge to read the novel to find out what’s actually happening. The film may have communicated its heroine’s boredom and bewilderment a little too effectively.